To all my readers, Happy New Year. Please feel free to take advantage of these special conference & expo rates (check out these low travel rates as well) as my gift to you. I hope to see you at the show January 20-22, 2010 -- a few weeks from now.

I often try to balance out my writing - not being too extreme in either direction and since yesterday I ended the day with a very positive piece about the billions of dollars in communications M&A transactions, today I thought it worth mentioning the decline of US patents granted to Americans. Here is an excerpt from a BusinessWeek article on the topic:

For the first time in 2009, non-Americans were granted more U.S. patents than resident inventors, accounting for 50.7% of new grants, according to recent data from the Patent & Trademark Office.

Yesterday I touched on the Iranian takedown of Twitter and after giving more thought to the matter it makes sense to send a strong warning to my readers in the corporate, financial and government sectors that cyberattacks and terrorism have the potential to get much worse. In 2010 I recommend increasing security budgets accordingly as we can expect potentially larger and more well-coordinated attacks than the one which took place against Twitter.

For the moment the social networks seem to be of particular interest for hackers and electronic thugs but going forward expect more emphasis on ecommerce, banking and areas like the smartgrid which have the ability to inflict even greater damage than traditional social network takedowns.

Dear readers, as you likely know, ITEXPO and the numerous collocated events with this event have been generating more and more attendance at a time when many shows have seen traffic drop precipitously. What will ITEXPO in Miami look like January 20-22 in 2010?

Here is a reminder of what happened last year - thanks to you the attendance was up 15%.

Thanks once again to you, the good news is the 2010 show is about one month away and the show hotel room block at the Loews is already sold out at 106%.

If you are looking for a single article which will illuminate the evolution of the Internet, the challenges regulators had when policing phone companies, the competition between cable and phone companies and net neutrality, look no further than this article from Fred Goldstein of ionary Consulting titled The Net that Got Away. In about 5-10 minutes you can read this well-written and historical article which describes how the Internet got to where it is today and how the Bell operating companies used regulatory sleight of hand to gain benefits from regulators in turn for promises that weren't kept.

This article discusses a book The $300 Billion Broadband Scandal by Bruce Kushnick, one of the biggest critics of the phone companies. Kushnick often complains about how the large phone companies have taken advantage of consumers and have broken promises repeatedly.

I wanted to alert my readers to some exciting news happening at TMC. As you likely know TMC is among a handful of media companies growing at a time when the media landscape is in dramatic decline. As you might imagine this growth is primarily online. Over the last decade and especially in the last few years we have focused on building online communities (Channels and GOCs) for customers who sponsor these areas as they rapidly attract focused decision-makers from around the world.

Here is an extremely informative overview of the challenges facing NSN from Caroline Gabriel. It leads off discussing the fact that Siemens is thinking of pulling out of the joint venture. The article points out where the company has been successful and where it has not. One area which is worth delving into is a mention of NSN pulling out of WiMAX without having significant LTE business.